APUSH CHAPTER 3.2 Religious Revivals, Enlightenment Thought, and Imperial Conflicts in Colonial America

Religious Ferment and the Great Awakening

During the middle of the eighteenth century, the colonial desire for material goods found a strong outlet in religious ferment. For many colonists, this movement provided more than just a spiritual release. The conservative Anglican clergyman Timothy Cutler complained that as a consequence of the Great Awakening, "our presses are forever teeming with books and our women with bastards." Regardless of whether Cutler's assessment was entirely accurate, the Great Awakening allowed many individuals to abandon the traditional notion that disobeying authority meant automatic damnation. The underlying principle emerged that human law could not condemn anything that God himself justified. Although the movement did not directly fuel opposition to British tax policies, it significantly undermined long-standing assumptions about traditional authority.

The influence of the Great Awakening extended far beyond individual churches, altering the landscape of higher education. In 1741, the president of Yale College publicly criticized the theology of itinerant ministers who attempted to imitate the renowned evangelist George Whitefield. In response, one traveling preacher asserted that a member of the Yale faculty possessed no more divine grace than a chair. Revivalists subsequently urged the New Light churches of Connecticut to withdraw their financial and moral support from Yale and establish an institution of their own. This push led directly to the founding of the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton, established in 1746 by New Side Presbyterians.

Several other prominent educational institutions were founded as direct by-products of the Great Awakening. The College of Rhode Island, later renamed Brown, was established by Baptists in 1765. Queen's College, which became Rutgers, was founded by Dutch Reformers in 1766. Dartmouth College was established in 1769 by New Light Congregationalists. These new colleges quickly set out to disprove the common allegation that an evangelical temperament was inherently hostile to intellectual learning and formal education.

The Ministry and Fall of Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards, the most prominent native-born revivalist of the Great Awakening, served as clear evidence that deep evangelical piety could coexist with rigorous intellectual pursuits. Edwards possessed a passion for academic learning alongside his intense religious devotion. In 1725, four years after graduating from Yale, he accepted a position as an assistant pastor to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, at the church in Northampton, Massachusetts. When Stoddard died two years later in 1727, Edwards assumed full leadership as pastor.

Throughout his six decades of leadership in Northampton, Solomon Stoddard exercised such immense influence over the ministers of the Connecticut Valley that some contemporaries referred to him as "pope." Stoddard's widespread prominence was largely due to his policy of open enrollment, which allowed individuals to join the church without presenting evidence of saving grace; simple good behavior was sufficient for membership. Consequently, when Edwards inherited the congregation, he found a membership marked by an "inordinate engagedness after this world," leaving their readiness for salvation in the next world highly questionable.

To address this spiritual indifference, Edwards cultivated a powerful talent for vividly dramatizing the fate of unconverted souls. In his sermons, the intense heat of Hell's consuming fires and the sickening stench of brimstone were made remarkably vivid to the congregation. His most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," was delivered at Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741. In this address, Edwards depicted a "dreadfully provoked" God holding the unconverted over the pit of Hell, "much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect." To ensure no listener missed the personal application, Edwards declared that "this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be." His words produced immediate, intense emotional responses, causing parishioners to groan loudly and cry out, "What must I do to be saved?"

This intense spiritual anxiety produced severe psychological strain for some members of the community. Joseph Hawley, a disconsolate parishioner overwhelmed by distress regarding his salvation, committed suicide by slitting his throat. Edwards responded to this tragedy with calm detachment, remarking that "Satan seems to be in a great rage." However, Hawley's death created deep misgivings among several prominent church members, who began to long for the more forgiving and accommodating God preached by Solomon Stoddard. Edwards refused to moderate his intense message, leading his parishioners to vote unanimously in 1749 to dismiss him from his pastoral post. Edwards subsequently served as a missionary to Native Americans in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1759, he accepted an appointment as president of Princeton, but he passed away from smallpox before he could officially assume office.

Institutional Shifts and National Integration

By the early 1750s, public reaction had begun to turn against religious "enthusiasm" across most regions. The primary exception was the South, where traveling New Side Presbyterians and Baptists continued active evangelizing efforts among populations lacking organized churches. Beyond the South, the Great Awakening had largely run its course, to the extent that George Whitefield's tour of the colonies in 1754 generated little public attention.

Despite creating deep institutional and doctrinal divisions, the Great Awakening significantly advanced religious toleration in British North America. As individual religious groups claimed the fundamental right to worship according to their own conscience, they could not easily deny equivalent freedoms to other Protestant denominations. This shared experience rendered the Awakening the first truly national event in American history, marking the precise period when the previously isolated histories of New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South began to intersect and form permanent bonds.

Physical and political infrastructure further reinforced these growing intercolonial connections. As early as 1691, a rudimentary intercolonial postal system had been established to facilitate communication across regional boundaries. Later, in 1754, Benjamin Franklin proposed the farsighted Albany Plan for a colonial union, seeking to establish a unified defense system against frontier Indian attacks and address other shared colonial challenges. This initiative reflected the ongoing convergence of thirteen once-isolated colonies expanding to the north, south, and west.

Intellectual Foundations of the American Enlightenment

Alongside religious shifts, the 1740s witnessed a widespread rejection of both traditional Calvinism and Stoddard's Arminianism in favor of an intellectual framework aligned with the European Enlightenment. Proponents of this movement prioritized human reason and empirical scientific inquiry. Colonial society matured during a period shaped by the discoveries of astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), philosopher-mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who uncovered the physical laws governing gravity and motion.

These discoveries established a worldview in which impersonal, scientific laws governed all matter, whether animate or inanimate. Earth, the heavens, humanity, and animals were viewed as interconnected parts of a vast, intricate machine. Within this framework, God was conceived as a divine watchmaker and master technician who constructed and started the universe but rarely intervened in its immutable operation. Knowledge was increasingly seen as deriving from direct observation and human reason rather than divine revelation. Consequently, understanding natural laws was thought to give human beings the ability to shape their earthly destinies and influence their spiritual fates.

While most Enlightenment thinkers recognized that complete mastery of the physical world was unattainable and that humans were not entirely rational, they maintained that human capacity for reason was steadily improving. This conviction defined the Age of Reason. Educated colonists embraced these ideas, leading many to reject the doctrine of original sin and emphasize God's benevolence. Some questioned the divinity of Jesus Christ and adopted Unitarianism, while others, including Benjamin Franklin, embraced Deism—a faith centered on admiring God through the order of the natural universe rather than fearing his direct power over humanity.

The Enlightenment deeply transformed political thought across the colonies. The political writings of John Locke were widely adopted, particularly his argument that personal property served as an indispensable guard against tyranny, and that any government capable of arbitrarily seizing property possessed the power to enslave its citizens. American political thought was similarly shaped by Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, as well as French philosophes Montesquieu and Voltaire. Intellectual concepts moved from Europe to America rapidly, ensuring that colonial political disputes routinely involved pamphlets citing multiple European authorities. Radical concepts that were restricted to an elite minority in Europe became common topics of debate among the colonial populace.

This broad expansion of intellectual discourse stripped the clergy of their long-standing monopoly over intellectual life. By the 1750s, only a small minority of Harvard and Yale graduates pursued careers in the ministry. New secular educational institutions emerged, including the College of Philadelphia (founded in 1751, later the University of Pennsylvania) and King's College (founded in New York in 1754, later Columbia University), neither of which functioned primarily as seminary training grounds.

Professional groups rapidly assumed intellectual leadership in colonial towns. Lawyers, who began appearing in substantial numbers during the 1740s, quickly asserted authority in public and political affairs. Physicians and professors of natural history claimed greater competence in interpreting scientific developments than traditional clergymen. Furthermore, because academic disciplines remained unspecialized, self-educated amateurs actively contributed to scientific and political discourse.

Civic Organizations and Scientific Endeavors in Colonial America

Philadelphia became the primary hub for popular participation in Enlightenment intellectual life. In 1727, twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin established the Junto, a weekly Friday evening discussion group composed of young artisans who gathered to debate questions of morals, politics, and natural philosophy. In 1743, Franklin expanded this concept by founding the American Philosophical Society, designed to cultivate the fine arts and enhance the overall body of useful knowledge.

Although North America produced no figures equivalent to Galileo or Newton, colonial observers made major contributions to natural science by utilizing the continent as an expansive field laboratory. John Bartram, a Philadelphia Quaker who described himself as a "down right plain Country Man," traveled extensively from Florida to the Great Lakes during the mid-eighteenth century. Bartram collected and classified hundreds of plant species while conducting detailed observations of Native American cultures and speculating on their historical origins.

Benjamin Franklin achieved international scientific renown through his multifaceted research and practical inventions. Thomas Jefferson noted that no individual of the era had made more significant scientific discoveries. Franklin's systematic studies of electricity culminated in his 1752 kite experiment, establishing his international reputation. His practical inventions included the lightning rod, the iron Franklin stove—which provided vastly superior heating efficiency compared to traditional open fireplaces—and bifocal spectacles. Outside of science, Franklin served fourteen years in the Pennsylvania assembly from 1751 to 1764, established a circulating library, organized funding for Philadelphia's first hospital, devised public lotteries for civic projects, and taught himself Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Colonial participation in European intellectual networks fostered dynamic connections among thinkers in New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South. In 1751, Franklin utilized statistical demography to predict that within a single century, the majority of the English population would reside in North America. In 1752, Thomas Pownall applied Franklin's demographic projections alongside Newton's theory of gravitational attraction to political governance in his work Principles of Polity. Pownall argued that as the American colonies gained mass, they would exert a gravitational pull stronger than that of Great Britain itself. He warned that unless enlightened rulers modified the imperial system to accommodate this shift, the growing weight of the colonies would inevitably heave the imperial center entirely out of its place.

Imperial Rivalries, Trade Conflict, and Frontier Warfare

British North America was continuously reshaped by international events and global trade rivalries. Driven by mercantilist economic theory, European nations competed intensely for markets and colonial raw materials. This competition maintained a state of near-constant formal and informal warfare throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with European powers clashing across Europe, the Americas, and global trade routes.

Although European planners routinely viewed the American colonies as secondary assets to be exchanged or sacrificed in treaties, the colonists rapidly developed their own intense regional animosities. French and Spanish forces engaged in brutal conflicts in Florida as early as the sixteenth century. Prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Samuel Argall of Virginia launched attacks on French settlements in Maine and captured Jesuit priests, transporting them to Jamestown. The abundance of North American resources exacerbated border conflicts and territorial greed among rival European settlers.

The rich North Atlantic fisheries of the Grand Banks became a persistent source of conflict between French Canadian and New England colonists. Despite the abundance of cod, fishermen required terrestrial bases to dry and salt their catches, provoking continuous clashes over control of harbors across Maine, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.

The fur trade generated even severe territorial hostilities. Unrestricted hunting rapidly depleted forest animal populations, driving fur traders into violent rivalries over lucrative hunting grounds. French traders in Canada formed trade networks with Algonquin and Huron tribes, placing them in direct conflict with the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy in central New York. By 1609, the Iroquois were engaged in open warfare against the French and their Native allies.

For decades, the Iroquois maintained a dominant position as military fighters and commercial traders. They delivered vast quantities of beaver pelts to Dutch merchants at Albany, procuring furs through their own trapping and by ambushing enemy trade canoes. The Iroquois systematically defeated and dispersed the Huron population north of Lake Ontario while extending their commercial reach to Native trappers as far west as Michigan. When the English seized New Amsterdam, they maintained the established trade alliances with the Iroquois, supplying them with manufactured trade goods and firearms in exchange for furs.

By the final decade of the seventeenth century, the decline of Dutch imperial power and the weakening of Spain left Great Britain and France as the primary competitors for North American dominance. Over the subsequent 125 years, European diplomatic alliances shifted repeatedly, but the British colonists and the French—whom Boston lawyer John Adams termed "the turbulent Gallicks"—remained constant adversaries.

The Intercolonial Wars and Borderland Strains

The initial three Anglo-French colonial conflicts involved limited direct military action by imperial armies, consisting primarily of frontier raids and ambushes against isolated settlements. King William's War, lasting from 1689 to 1697 and marking the American phase of the War of the League of Augsburg, featured French raids on Schenectady, New York, and various New England frontier towns. English colonists retaliated by capturing Port Royal, Nova Scotia, though French forces retook the post in 1691. The Peace of Ryswick in 1697 returned all captured North American territories to their original imperial owners.

The War of the Spanish Succession, fought from 1702 to 1713 to prevent a Bourbon union of France and Spain, was known in America as Queen Anne's War. French-aligned Native forces completely destroyed Deerfield, Massachusetts, while South Carolina forces attacked and burned St. Augustine in Spanish Florida. New England troops recaptured Port Royal. Under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France ceded Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay region to Great Britain.

These conflicts inflicted heavy human and economic costs on the civilian populations of New England and Canada. High casualties occurred during frontier raids and formal military operations in Nova Scotia. To finance war expenditures, Massachusetts raised taxes substantially and issued large sums of paper currency, triggering severe inflation that significantly reduced the living standards of wage earners.

The third major conflict, King George's War (1740–1748), represented the American theater of the War of the Austrian Succession. Frontier settlements in New York and New England faced repeated raids. However, a New England colonial force achieved a major military success by capturing the massive French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, which guarded the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Colonial leaders were deeply angered when the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 returned Louisbourg to France in exchange for concessions elsewhere.

These imperial wars created persistent friction between British authorities and colonial governments, as issues deemed minor in London caused immense resentment in the colonies. Furthermore, these wars intensified mutual hatred between British colonists and French settlers along the St. Lawrence River. English colonists routinely blamed French provocateurs for frontier hostilities, even though colonial encroachment was frequently the primary cause. Disputes were further aggravated by conflicting land grants, as Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York held overlapping territorial claims in the Ohio Valley, directly contradicting French claims of exclusive sovereignty over the region.

The escalation toward broader war intensified during the 1740s. France had established a continuous network of military forts and trading posts stretching from Mackinac Island in northern Michigan to Kaskaskia on the Mississippi River, Vincennes on the Wabash River, Fort Niagara in the east, and the Bourbon River near Lake Winnipeg in the west. However, in the 1740s, Pennsylvania fur trader George Croghan led English traders north of the Ohio River, establishing trade relations with Miami and Huron hunters who had historically traded with the French. In 1748, Croghan constructed a fortified trading post at Pickawillany in Miami territory in western Ohio. That same year, agents representing the Ohio Company—a land speculation venture organized by prominent Virginians—entered the region to secure territorial claims.

Captivity and Identity on the Frontier: The Story of Eunice Williams

In February 1704, during Queen Anne's War, a joint French and Native force launched a violent pre-dawn raid on the frontier settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Seven-year-old Eunice Williams was awakened by shattering glass and splintering wood as raiders breached her home. Her father, a Puritan minister, called for assistance before being captured and bound in his nightshirt. Raiders murdered Eunice's six-year-old brother Little John, her infant sibling, and a household slave named Parthena in the snow outside the home. The surviving members of the Williams family were forced into the town meeting house alongside other captured residents and fitted with moccasins for a forced march to Canada.

During the retreat into the northern wilderness, captives who failed to maintain the forced pace were executed with clubs or hatchets. Eunice's mother, exhausted and weakened from a recent childbirth, fell behind during the march; her husband was forbidden from assisting her, and she was killed by the captors. Throughout the journey, an individual Mohawk captor carried Eunice on his shoulders across difficult terrain, covered her with a blanket at night, and provided her with food.

Upon arriving at a major Mohawk settlement near Montréal, the male captives were stripped and subjected to ritual beatings with clubs and burning sticks. Women and children were treated far more leniently. Their hair was cut, their ears were pierced, and they were ceremonially immersed in water, painted, and dressed in traditional Mohawk attire consisting of loose sleeveless tunics, knee-length skirts, leggings decorated with moose hair, and leather moccasins, with their hair greased and bound by eel-skin ribbons.

Eunice was formally adopted into a Mohawk family operating within a matrilineal social structure, where husbands and wives resided separately with their respective maternal kin and children remained within the mother's extended family network. In 1706, her father was ransomed and returned to Massachusetts, and her surviving brothers were redeemed shortly thereafter. However, the Mohawk refused all requests to release Eunice, stating that they would as soon part with their hearts as part with her, and noting that she was unwilling to return.

By 1713, Eunice had married a Mohawk man and completely lost her fluency in the English language. When an English trader dispatched by her father met with her alongside an interpreter, she remained mostly silent, ultimately uttering only the Mohawk phrase "Jaghte Oghte," meaning "maybe not." She firmly refused to leave her community. Decades later, she traveled to Massachusetts to visit her biological brothers. Although local residents offered her standard English dresses and indoor lodging, she refused, wrapping herself in a blanket to sleep outdoors in an orchard with her husband. She returned to Canada, remaining with the Mohawk until her death in 1785 under the name Gannenstenhawi, which translates to "she who brings in corn."

Questions & Discussion

The case of Eunice Williams highlights fundamental historical questions regarding cultural assimilation and personal identity on the colonial frontier. The English parents of Eunice Williams maintained that she remained fundamentally a British colonist by birth and heritage, whereas her adoptive Mohawk family asserted that she had fully become a Native American. This raises broader questions regarding what specific factors define an individual's core identity, and whether a person can genuinely renounce their original heritage in favor of an adopted culture.

Similar dynamics applied to the millions of European immigrants and enslaved Africans who arrived in British North America throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians examine which specific elements of European or African cultural heritage these diverse groups consciously preserved, which practices they abandoned under forced or voluntary assimilation, and the extent to which their fundamental sense of self was altered by the colonial environment.